Have you seen how freakin’ expensive gas is right now? I’m sure you have, as you have eyes, you have work, you have to take your kids to school, and get around town. All that, unless you’re driving an EV, takes gasoline to do. Hell, even if you are running on electrons, you see how much everything else has risen in price lately? Yeah, that’s because those require shipping and that requires gas!
Everything is connected to gas prices, including your bank account’s balance.
With everyone doing more with less in recent decades, thanks to inflation, wage stagnation, and the United States’ polticians unwilling to help the common person, your wallet is the first thing that hurts when the price of gas rises. And no one, no one, wants to pay more for a gallon of gas than what they have to, which tends to mean looking around for the best price first. That, however, can be tedious, and can lead to you using even more gas, which costs you more in the end.
Hell, even fuel-sipping motorcycles have this issue. Which is why when I saw that there’s a tool called “The Gas Index,” which is a crowd-sourced gas price index aimed squarely at saving folks money, I knew we had to cover it.
The concept is simple. Using robocalls, crowd-sourced research and photography, and that’s about it, the Gas Price Index can determine the average price of gas around your current location, as well as which gas station has the cheapest fuel prices right now. And it originally started as a tool to track the cost of a pint of Guinness in Ireland, cause yeah, that makes sense.
According to our friends at The Drive, ” The Gas Index allows you to add your vehicles and location to an account, so that when it serves up the cheapest gas, it’s automatically factoring in how far you’ll have to drive to get it, how thirsty your car is, and what octane it requires.” The tool was built by two engineers, Matt Cortland and Jon Fleming, who also threw in information on where your gas came from in the world, who owns which station, how much our current idiotic Middle Eastern war is contributing to the cost of gasoline, and how it impacts your own bank account over time, and more. It’s a pretty handy thing, and it lays out the costs associated with our latest forary into meddling with other people’s societies nicely.
Now here’s my only disclaimer; it’s built using AI. If you’re familiar with RideApart, I’m at war with the technology, as I find the whole thing rather inhuman, especially when it comes to creative endeavors. My job, as well as my entire teams’ jobs, are threatened by it. Not because it can do what we do, but because a bunch of MBA suits think it can. It can’t.
I will say, this form of AI assistance, something to brute-force a tracker into existence, is maybe one of the few exceptions I’ve found with AI anything. The most important other is being able to screen cancer patients, find tumors, or anything to do with brute-forcing multiple potential drug trials to save people from incurable diseases and the like.
Either way, The Gas Index could save you a ton, even when you’re filling up a motorcycle, so I’d give it a look through
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